


Beneath an Orange Sky

by voodoochild



Category: Doctor Who (1963)
Genre: Awesome Ladies Ficathon, Gen, Time War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-05
Updated: 2010-07-05
Packaged: 2017-10-10 09:46:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/98304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/voodoochild/pseuds/voodoochild
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ace McShane made Gallifrey her home. When Gallifrey comes calling, she finds out that some renegades are as bad as you think and some - aren't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Beneath an Orange Sky

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the prompt: "explosions in the sky".

Gallifrey is wondrous for the first six months. There is color everywhere, their silver mountains, long red grass, ornate gold and silver and white robes, TARDISes of every shape and size, and the myriad of colors she can't even name when she is taken to the Panopticon and the Untempered Schism.

(She'd swallowed a scream and made it as far as the shuttlepad when Cardinal Braxiatel had laughed and said she was certainly Theta's type of person.)

But as the years go by, she starts to understand why the Doctor left. Gallifrey is static, stuck in an endless loop of see-no-evil-hear-no-evil-speak-no-evil and mostly uninterested in the "lesser" races. Romana - President Romana, she tries to remember to call her, but she forgets and Romana doesn't mind - tries her best, she and the Council, but Romana is one voice among many. Leela teaches her hand-to-hand and shares stories of the planets she went to with the Doctor. Brax (who hates her use of the diminuative of his name) is dry and sneaky when she least expects it, and doesn't quite help her cheat in intergalactic history, but well, what else do you call tailoring 1/3 of the exam about "primitive mechanics" on Industrial Revolution England?

There is so much (too much) to learn.

She has classes in temporal detection (learning to spot inconsistencies in time, and she'd shocked the other students when she caught a low-level Grandfather Paradox hanging around), ethics of inter-species contact (which Professor Octavius lets her lecture in sometimes, being of a different species herself), quantum maths (which she hates, but is slowly doing better at), and Trans-Dimensional Engineering (or, "TARDIS-Fixing 101", as she calls it, and it's day two when she cracks up an entire class by mimicking the sound the Doctor's TARDIS makes upon landing).

She's busy, and she supposes in retrospect, that was a good thing. Because when the War starts, it isn't long before an apologetic Romana comes to her with a special assignment: help the Time Lords build bombs.

Make things explode instead of sitting in quantum maths? Sign her up!

Ace travels to the two weapons depots - Arcadia, a few light-years from Gallifrey and the source of the transduction barrier, and Miasimia Goria. On Arcadia, she walks the technicians through making Nitro-9, adapting it for use in weapons of various shapes and sizes. On Miasimia Goria, though, it's different. There, she meets the Rani. Mel had told her a little about the renegade, and Ace has to say - she's nothing like Mel described.

The Rani calls her a useless primate, but says if she's going to be helping the Time Lords build bombs, she might as well learn the right way. The Rani's main interest is in biochemical weapons - illusion grenades, time-field dispersers, trans-species reality plagues - but she knows her explosives, too. Ace's homemade Nitro-9 is even, according to her, "an acceptably primitive inflammatory agent", but Ace sees the look in the Rani's eyes as she starts calculating what she could adapt Nitro-9 to do.

And so it's only a few years into the War until Ace gets to blow something _really big_ up. She even gets to return to Gallifrey to do it. It's some big complicated counter-strike and she knows very little of the details, other than they're modifying a delta wave with Nitro-9 and a new compound the Rani's developed and it's going to have to be big enough to take out a Dalek supercruiser.

Ace measures and mixes. She wires the canisters to the battle TARDIS they're using as a delivery system. She quintuple-checks to make sure everything's working (she can just _hear_ the Rani's voice if she botches this). She sends the detonation code to whatever poor sod they've got manning the battle TARDIS.

Their laboratory is deep underneath the Citadel, and Ace takes the lift impatiently, the Rani eye-rolling at her fidgeting. They get outside just as the countdown hits 5, and Ace finishes it under her breath.

4

3

2

1

_Boom._

Gallifrey's sky goes white - pure heat and fire from the Nitro-9, then a second burst of green energy from the plague enzymes. They eat the cruiser from the inside-out, and the light show is rather spectacular. Even the Rani has a smile of satisfaction on her face (she's scary as hell, Ace admits, but knows what she's about when it comes to science).

The doors open behind them, and a tall man in long red robes comes out. Ace can hear the Rani's indrawn breath of shock, looks over to see the woman clenching her fists tightly.

"My Lord Rassilon," she says quietly.

"My Lady Rani. I understand I have you to thank for this victory?"

"Partially." The Rani directs a sharp nod in Ace's direction. "The base explosive is of Miss McShane's design. The biochemical modifications are mine."

Ace feels the weight of his gaze hit her, and she has the sudden urge to do something really stupid, like shoot him. Or fall on her knees. Or run away.

"You're the Lord Doctor's human, aren't you? Well, we'll be keeping an eye on you then, won't we?"

"I guess so," she stammers out.

Decades later, when Romana is imprisoned, Leela exiled, Octavius and the Rani dead, and Rassilon ascended to the Presidency, Ace will look back on that moment and wish with all her heart she'd stuffed a grenade down his throat.


End file.
